Open source is incredible.

Several months ago, I got fed up with having to download Xcode to build my software. I took the Xcode installer, ripped out all of the parts I didn’t need, and made a nice installer for GCC. It ended up being ~200MB in size. It took 2 minutes to download.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t include the 10.6/7 SDKs due to licensing restrictions. These SDKs include CoreAudio, CoreData, OpenGL, and more. Most software that isn’t build specifically for OSX would build perfectly. Unfortunately, some software added some needless system dependencies, though (I’m looking at you, Node).

I stuck it up on GitHub, and much to my delight, it became a pretty big hit. It solved a lot of headaches for a lot of people.

Today, the project has 1649 watchers on GitHub and has been downloaded 53,400 times. That’s 13.7 Terabytes of transfer. Thanks, GitHub, for the generous hosting.

Homebrew did their best to support the project, but the official stance was “if you buy a Mac, you buy the whole package”, pointing everyone to install full Xcode if they had any problems. Far from ideal, but I was content.

Apple’s Interest

Meanwhile, Apple reached out to me to discuss some details about OSX-GCC-Installer. They took an interest in shipping something official, but they weren’t sure of the proper approach to take to support projects like Homebrew.

I hopped on the phone, explained the specific needs of Homebrew, the restrictions with the proprietary headers and licensing, and what the ideal situation would be.

Months passed and I didn’t hear anything. Until today.

Command Line Tools for Xcode

Today, Apple added a beautiful new package to their official developer tools suite:Command Line Tools for Xcode. It’s a 171 MB download that includes all of the tools a Homebrew should ever need. Best of all, it contains the proprietary headers that I couldn’t ship myself.